[fpc-devel] GTK+ status in Free Pascal

[Rob van der Linde]

Hi all, I was wondering if anybody knew what the current status of the
GTK+ units is in Free Pascal. I am looking at the official GTK+ website,
and this informs me it's currently supporting GTK+ 2.4, but is this
correct?

http://www.gtk.org/bindings.html

I've been compiling and running a few of the GTK+ demos with Free
Pascal, and they seem to work well.

I have also however, been playing around with the java-gnome bindings (I
just used the previous version I think, not the only-just-released 4.0).

http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/

Now java-gnome has two ways of initialising a program, gtk_init(); and
Program.initGnomeUI(appName, appVersion, args); If you use the second
version, you get the proper appName apearing on message dialogs, and
also on gnome about windows, including the appVersion on the about
dialog.

I have found with the Free Pascal GTK+ bindings, I get "untitled"
showing on message dialogs, which is not the best, and I am not sure if
you can yet do the official Gnome about dialogs with Free Pascal. I am
initialising my Free Pascal applications using gtk_init();

Now my question is: the unit responsible in java-gnome for the
Program.initGnomeUI() function appears to be gnome2.12.jar on my
machine. I know the GTK+ bindings have been done for Free Pascal, but
have the gnome2 bindings been done also?

I am wanting to write application for Gnome using Free Pascal, but want
to make sure the GTK+ units are up-to-date (2.10) and the gnome2 unit is
also supported, and it's the latest version. I do not actually know what
version of GTK+ comes with Free Pascal, I noticed this page:

http://www.freepascal.org/packages/gtk.html

However, I can't see any information on this page about the current
version of GTK+ that Free Pascal supports. I also noticed this page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gtk2forpascal

Now my next question is: Is this the same project that is included with
Free Pascal, or is this another project all together?

First of all, if the GTK+ version of the units that come with Free
Pascal is higher than 2.4, should we not see if we can get them bump it
up on the official GTK+ page, it will make Free Pascal look better than
the other languages :)

However, if GTK+ does not currently support the latest 2.10 release and
also the gnome2, glade2, cairo, glib, and pango libraries yet, how much
work is currently been done on this? Is help needed? If so, can I help?
I have roughly 10 years experience in Turbo Pascal/TMT Pascal/Delphi
(and many other C style languages too), and consider myself to be an
advanced Pascal programmer. I have only been using GTK+ for a while
though, but I'm sure I can pick it up real fast from the original C
libraries and documentation.